


Fall of Man [0]

by matrioshkabrain



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Other, first upload of my writing anywhere i am terribly shy, fray is in briefly though if i continue this he'll show up a bit, slight body horror warning for light aether corruption, wol is gender ambigious
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-10 22:55:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,763
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28035009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/matrioshkabrain/pseuds/matrioshkabrain
Summary: Short but sweet back and forth between our favorite warrior and our favorite Ascian.A writing sketch of some sort for a larger exploration.
Relationships: Solus zos Galvus | Emet-Selch/Warrior of Light
Kudos: 13





	Fall of Man [0]

**Author's Note:**

> This was written in may 2020, discovered again by me just now while I was thinking of picking up writing again & I found this in my drafts. There are some little things that bother me here & there, & it is unfinished (though I had only a few sentences left in it anyway) & ends abruptly. Sorry about that. 
> 
> I am posting here for some feedback on whether to continue or not. I have no friends into this game as much as me so I'm all alone here with my pairing of two people that are awful for each other.
> 
> WOL is gender ambiguous. 
> 
> Thanks for reading.

You had long since abandoned the notion that any sort of external mechanism could keep you asleep. Fruitless nights were spent restless, full of pacing and overthinking and hours that were far too silent. It's said that the thirty-third minute of the third bell of the day is the closest time to the afterlife, the time when daemons and spirits roused from their eternal bed to wander.

If only for an hour, before their chains were pulled back into the other world.

In the dimly lit hallway in the middle of the night there was a palpable sense of ennui hanging thickly in the air, as though the oxygen itself was slowly turning to an apathetic sludge. A land bathed in light for the past 100 years wouldn't give itself up to the darkness so easily, light still hid in every nook and crevice where it would only become dark slowly and achingly. Below you, perhaps another floor or two, a body of water sat still. An artificial river of some sort ran under The Pendants, for now only serving as an obsidian mirror for the sky above.

You look upwards at the heavens, a dark ocean painted with stars. A star, perhaps, for each soul that had ever set foot on this land; forsaken to the light and doomed to shine eternally. And you wonder, a little selfishly, if that had been decided as your lot in life the second Hydaeyln chose you. Forsaken to the light, ever attracting those lost in the dark, ever in the centre of everything that happens to you.

_ I've never been fond of Gods _ . Fray says, a disembodied voice coming from somewhere and nowhere in unison. You can see his dark outline out of the corner of your eye, a mirage that chose to not be fully witnessed.  _ You'd think things would've turned out some way with an almighty power shaping our path. Yet Halone nor Hydaelyn nor the rest of them could be bothered to actually  _ **_do_ ** _ anything. Just let humans loose and let them go at it for a couple thousand years! Consequences of it be damned! Fie, what a terrible idea _ . 

  
  


You hum in agreement, though of course you would; you were talking to yourself. And not yourself. Every so often the question rises up to your conscious mind: what if the Scions were to know? What if the Eorzean Alliance, those that look up to you, your so called adoring masses? What if they were to know that you were so close to cracking that the only solace you’d ever been able to find was this shadowy mass of a long dead knight standing besides you?

As though in response to your inquiry you feel a sharp needle sewing its way through your left palm. Painful and worrying as it may be to anyone else, you’d come to accept this new oddity ever since the first time it appeared: when you defeated the Lightwarden Titania, absorbed their light, and had to hastily hide the bright white stigmata that appeared in the middle of your palm as your friends rushed to your side to make sure you were okay. (You weren’t, but you’d be damned if you ever let any of them know that.)

  
  
  


It looks like an incredibly dense pebble had shot through a glass bowl. A round shape, cracking and fraying at the edges, spreading out in the wrinkles and veins and scars of your hand like a fluid liquid, ever inching out the more and more light you bring into yourself. As though through some sense of magnetism, you realized, that not only does the light from the Wardens go to you, as does the light from the common Sin Eaters, too. Like moths to a flame.

You stare at the glowing white mark in your palm and you frown, feeling Fray decide he was bored and taking his leave. Or maybe he was frustrated- frustrated that you’d once again gone along with the wishes of others so much as to cause yourself pain like this again. Titania had only been slain that very day! But despite that there were still Lightwardens left for you to track down and slaughter, and you find yourself tired at the very thought. So tired that all you want to do is bask in this quiet night for just a little longer.

But of course, a break in the stillness alerts you. 

Cutting through the stagnant air like a hand dipping through water, directly behind you. About to scoop you up like a prize goldfish at a fair. Much in the same way that hand enters the water it appears seemingly out of nowhere and then demands far greater space than is given to it. You're able to turn around just as the massive aether finally hits yours; a stalwart structure in the midst of a hurricane. And when that hurricane fully reaches you, in the eye, do you see the culprit.

Emet-selch stands before you, all gallancy and valour and prim-and-properness. Taking on the same appearance you'd seen him don the first time you met hours ago; at the foot of the Crystal Tower, around the Scions, the choking aether of his far more distant. Meant as a gesture of good will, perhaps, one that wasn't afforded to you right now as it smothered you in an icy chill like the winds of Coerthas that bit at your heels and always left you running, moving, an instinctual reaction to get somewhere safer. Not on purpose, you think; you'd been attacked by pure aether before and that was always  _ direct _ . It always pierced and cut at you, not… morosely enveloping you like a pool of water.

As for the man himself;

He looked like a corpse dragged out of its own funeral, gaunt and sunken. Already cleaned, rotting guts tended to, makeup applied. Maybe his lips were already sewn shut with how tightly pursed they turned when he looked at you. His expression one you were unable to decipher clearly; so perfectly neutral but with the slightest hint of  _ contempt _ . This knowledge creeping out of the back of your mind like something familiar in the way deja vu from a dream will pop up in the middle of a random conversation and you catch yourself. Did I dream this before? No, I couldn't have. 

  
  


You recall that in some more modern burial practices the body has a spiked lens placed on the eyes to hold the eyelids shut. Lest they open of their own accord at a viewing and leave everyone with their last reminder of a loved one being those cloudy, distant eyes. Stained an ugly grey and not even reflecting the grief around them. Emet-selch had those eyes; staring at you and past you. Long dead yet you were looking directly into them.

"Galvus?” You implore, your body language on guard but your inflection puzzled. Always a person of few words, the amount of effort you expend in the few seconds it takes you to come up with an actual statement is not lost on you. Even when you speak, it’s with the assumption that you’re about to be talked over as usual. “Do you have need of me?”

Emet-selch tuts, inching towards you, making you aware of the fact that your back was to a low railing saving you from the water below. It’s not that you were afraid; it’s that when something typically advances upon you like a predator animal the way he does, as he quietly steps ever closer and closer, it’s in your instinct to react. 

“Dear hero, a sane person would be asleep at this ghastly hour of the night! Though I realize I’m calling myself out here as well, seeing as how we’re now speaking with each other. Or rather;  _ I’m  _ speaking at  _ you _ .”

Against your instincts that tell you to fight, (somehow; tell him off, flick him on his stupid forehead, whatever) you find that all you can do is stand your ground and glare at him. You weren’t stupid enough to start a fight in the Crystarium and he wasn’t reckless enough to so quickly get rid of that good will he had talked up earlier; so then- what?

“Answer my question, Galvus. What do you want.”

“To impart my knowledge,” He hums, tilting his head ever so slightly to the side as he looks at you, now standing a few paces away. “As I said I would. I had thought to keep this to myself earlier, but how could I bare it when the incessant ringing from  _ that  _ won’t let me sleep?”

His silk-gloved hand points at the palm resting at your side. The centre of it is bright and slowly, slowly dripping with light. It turns to fluid and runs down your fingers but won’t drip down below; as though being kept on you with some magnetic force. You hadn’t even noticed it’d started.. s _ ecreting  _ anything, and when you see it you habitually move to wipe the excess fluid off on your pants; but of course, it ignores the normal mechanisms of a liquid and continues to stick to your skin. 

Something about what Emet-selch had said stuck with you, so as you hold your palm up to yourself to cradle it, you turn your gaze upwards at him. Looking down upon you with the smallest hint of disgust.

“Ringing? You can  _ hear  _ this?” You ask.

“Of course I can. As if you had just rung a bell in my ear.” He furrows his brows. “Of course you wouldn’t be able to; but maybe there’s finally a saving grace with all of your lackings, hm?” 

You grit your teeth.

“If you came here to tell me to turn it off I’m quite sorry to inform you that there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Emet-selch laughs. “Oh, dear hero, that’s the opposite of why I’m here. I  _ can  _ do something about it. For your sake as well as mine. Tell me; have your friends been keeping it from you? That all that light aether was eating you from the inside out? If they had just not wanted to worry you they are quite the darlings, but…”

“No matter how well you are able to control all of that excess aether it will take its toll. So thoughtful were they that they did not even consider warning you of the pain you’re about to go through.”

The pit that forms in your stomach is heavy enough to almost knock you off balance.


End file.
